Attention Rapists: You've Met Your Match

From Steubenville, Ohio, to Washington, D.C., from city courts to Twitter feeds, a new generation of women are taking the fight for justice into their own hands. Let their total fearlessness inspire you.

By now, you’re probably familiar with the chilling details of what happened last August 11 in Steubenville, Ohio: A 16-year-old girl, drunk and passed out, was raped twice over the course of a long evening, her body hauled from party to party by two of Steubenville High’s star football players. Dozens of teens witnessed the events. Not one intervened. Instead, they took photos and broadcast them to the world on Instagram and Twitter. “Whore status,” one tweeted. “Hahahahhaaha.”

Why do so many of us know all of this? Why has this particular sexual assault captured the nation’s attention, as opposed to the almost 600 others that happened that same day? Because someone—in fact, thousands of someones—finally said, “Enough.”

One of those someones was Cassandra Fairbanks, 28, a sound technician then living in Pittsburgh, who had just gotten involved with the controversial “hacktivist” group Anonymous. When another member sent a warning to the group alleging that the Steubenville case was being ignored by local authorities, Fairbanks started combing social media sites and digging up tweets and posts from the night of the incident. The research tore her heart out. “I read about this passed-out girl and someone peeing on her,” she says. “And the more I read, the madder I got. So we posted all that information.” As the case began to draw attention, Fairbanks drove to Ohio to help organize Occupy Steubenville protests; thousands of people attended, many wearing Anonymous’ trademark Guy Fawkes masks and carrying signs with messages like “Red rover, red rover, your rape crew is over.” Within weeks the trial began, and this March the boys were sentenced to at least one year in juvenile jail on rape charges.

Meanwhile in Louisville, Kentucky, high schooler Savannah Dietrich, a self-described “quiet, smart girl,” was just getting over her own devastating Steubenville-like experience: Drunk at a party, she too had been sexually abused by two athletes—these, lacrosse players from a Catholic boys’ academy. Pleading guilty, they were referred to a sex offender treatment program and required to do 50 hours of volunteer work. But when Dietrich learned that if she spoke out about the case, she could get 180 days in jail, the disparity of the two punishments enraged her. So she sent a tweet that would change everything: “Will Frey and Austin Zehnder sexually assaulted me. There you go, lock me up. I’m not protecting anyone that made my life a living hell.” Support flooded in from women around the country applauding Dietrich’s courage. “It was my God-given right to put those boys’ names out there,” Dietrich, now 18, tells Glamour. “You have to be brave enough to stand up for yourself. To be silenced and bullied by the court system, I was ready to go to jail to fight that.” (In the end, she didn’t have to; her contempt charges were dropped.)

Fairbanks and Dietrich don’t know each other, but they are part of a movement. At its most extreme end is Anonymous, whose “irreverent, insurgent, radical form of activism is really chang- ing the public consciousness around rape,” says Gabriella Coleman, Ph.D., an anthropology profes- sor of science and technology at McGill University in Montreal. And though some of that group’s members may use illegal tactics (like hacking into cell phone messages), their fed-up attitude reflects a mood that’s going mainstream. “It really feels like we’re nearing a tipping point,” marvels Linda Fairstein, legendary head of the sex crimes division of the Manhattan district attorney’s office from 1976 to 2002. “People are finally insisting that the way we’ve been dealing with this is simply not good enough. I’ve been waiting so many years for this to happen.”
And it is happening—because of Fairbanks and Dietrich and women and men everywhere who are making noise and calling for change. Take a look at what they’ve done.

From Occupy Steubenville to Occupy Rape

Rape, of course, predates the Bible. To understand why the conversation around it has changed, says Kathy Bonk, a long-time activist and media consultant in Washington, D.C., you have to understand how women have changed. The new young rape fighters in America, she points out, grew up playing sports and competing with boys; many fully expect to have a woman president someday. “Rape doesn’t fit their worldview,” she says. “It’s like, ‘Wait a second, I am equal. I am entitled to be able to walk down the street violence-free.’ They don’t see themselves as victims; they see themselves as empowered. And they’re outraged that this could even happen in today’s society.”

That outrage is moving many women to action. After Panayiota Bertzikis, 31, reported being assaulted by a fellow Coast Guard member in 2006, she was furious that he wasn’t court-martialed and that, instead, superiors made her feel guilty. “Why would I be ashamed?” she asks. “It’s my rapist who should be ashamed.” She joined a class-action lawsuit, alleging that officers mishandled her case, and, from her barracks, founded the Military Rape Crisis Center. The snowball effect she created helped pressure Congress to hold hearings this year on military sexual assault; President Obama himself expressed outrage, saying, “I have no tolerance for this.” And Casey Frazee, 30, took on the Peace Corps. After being attacked as a volunteer in South Africa at age 26, she felt she didn’t get the help she needed. (The Peace Corps declined to comment on her case.) So she started the group First Response Action, which wrote the first draft and helped pass a new law requiring the Peace Corps to provide better support for survivors. “I want to be a voice for those who can’t speak,” she says.

Bertzikis’ and Frazee’s message—that assailants, not their victims, should be ashamed—“marks a tremendous shift in attitude about sexual violence,” says Katherine Hull, spokesperson for the Rape, Abuse & Incest National Network. Even in the most violent cases, in which victims have often chosen anonymity, many women are now going public. Almost two years ago, on her way to teach her second-grade class, New Yorker Lydia Cuomo, then 25, was brutally raped at gunpoint by an off-duty cop. (“I was told, ‘If you open your eyes, I will blow your brains out.’”) But she quickly came forward to press for justice. “I hate being referred to as Michael Pena’s victim,” she explains. “I’m Lydia Cuomo. I am not a victim.” Political analyst Zerlina Maxwell, 31, had no problem opening up about her sexual attack either—she even stood her ground against Fox News’ Sean Hannity in a debate on how women should fend off assaults. “We have to stop telling women how not to be raped and instead teach men about consent,” she says. “It’s not that hard to get: ‘Do you want sex? Yes or no?’ Guys should learn that at age two.”

The just-do-it spirit

And then there’s the Internet. While it’s not always a good thing in rape cases (think of those pictures posted by Steubenville onlookers), it does give women everywhere a way to fight back.” Social media connects the dots from Penn State to India to Steubenville,” says Fairstein. “So what used to be the small grassroots ‘women against rape’ is now catching fire.”

One fire starter? Grace Brown, a photography student at New York City’s School of Visual Arts. Two years ago, when a friend was sexually assaulted, Brown, then a 19-year-old freshman, woke up the next morning with an idea: to photograph that friend holding a sign with the exact words her attacker said to her (“You wanted it, though”), and to post it on Tumblr. Today Brown’s Project Unbreakable features almost 2,000 such photographs and has been replicated at other colleges. “Rape statistics,” she says, “are easy to forget. I wanted to create something that would stay with people forever.”

At the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, Andrea Pino and Annie Clark had the same impulse: Something’s wrong; let’s fix it. Convinced the administration had been slow to respond to growing reports of sexual violence, they wrote a set of legal complaints against the school, including details of their own assaults. “We spent hours studying case law,” recalls Clark, now an administrator at the University of Oregon. “I was in the shower listening to podcasts of Title IX court cases!” The complaints sparked federal investigations of the school—and the duo’s IX Network now connects students fighting rape on other campuses across the country.

Some of the cases these women have started are still pending, but the ripple effect of all their actions is undeniable. The week of the Steubenville verdict, Samantha Stendal, 20, an Oregon student who knows Clark, cast, shot, and posted a 27-second YouTube video. In it, a young man gestures to a woman lying on a sofa and leers: “Hey, bros. Check who passed out on the couch. Guess what I’m going to do to her?” He steps out of frame, then returns with a blanket, pillow, and glass of water. “Real men,” he says, “treat women with respect.”

The video received 300,000 views its first day up and underlines a key point about the new war on rape: Men are fighting it too.”This is not only a girls’ thing,” says Stendal. “My male friends are just as fed up.” Glamour discovered that the member who started Anonymous’ Steubenville operation is, in fact, a man, who goes by the handle KYAnonymous. He says now: “We have changed a town and made the nation, if not the world, question just how rapists get off so easy in the first place.” And the group is working on other cases. “Our biggest aim,” says Fairbanks, “is to let rapists know: If you guys do this, we will see you. And we are going to make sure everyone else does too.”

That commitment may make the world safer for all of us. “We are witnessing a moment,” says Kate Harding, whose upcoming book, Asking for It, examines rape culture. “These amazing women are making sure sexual assault can’t be swept under the rug anymore. They are tweeting, posting videos, sending photos, creating an evidence trail that no one can ignore. And sunlight is the best disinfectant.”